Quote Originally Posted by tajoh111 View Post
You can only extrapolate so much and do so much with the technology you have at the time.

AMD R and D budget is tiny compared to Intel and NV(especially Intel), you can over estimate your rivals performance by 1000% and it will do nothing if you don't have the r and d budget to get something going to match that estimate.

With so many losing quarters in the past(except a couple quarters lately), I can imagine AMD graphic division was working on a shoestring budget, especially when AMD itself is so in the hole. Thankfully the research ATI put into r600 before the AMD and ATI merger paid off to some extent with r7xx and possibly to an extent r8xx as it turned out r6xx turned out to be a very scalable architecture. However research for the next big thing I can imagine being lacking for AMD and if this thing performs 50-60% faster than rv870, then AMD will need to come out with something new and not just a bigger chip with more shaders as returns have started to decrease with more shaders.

It will take either a big chip from AMD(which seems to be against their design philosophy) or a new architecture. I think a new architecture is not coming any time soon because of budget issues.

What AMD did with the R8xx is stretch the limits of the design(which NV did with g80->g200) that began with r600, it's all you can do when your company doesn't have the money to design a new architecture.
Expect a shrink in '10 and a new architecture 1H '11, if not before.
You seem to not realize that architectures take 3-4years of design, not 2-3 months.